FUTURE DIRECTION AND

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 25

MICHAEL L. PROTACIO

Subject Instructor

CLOIE MAE NICOLE DINEROS

GERALD GABANE

BSBA-HRDM 4B

Management Kits Future of Organizational Development

Organization Development (OD) is not in crisis. I know many highly regarded and
impactful OD practitioners and departments, across a range of industries, who are in
high demand from their organizations’ business partners and leaders. The profile of the
OD function seems to be rising again, with top executives recognizing the value OD can
create by building organizational capabilities.

But the tasks, and thus the approaches, of OD are rapidly evolving. One key
driver for this is management innovations and new forms of organizing, in addition to
fundamental and fast-paced transformations across many industries. Thus, the experts
for organizational processes and change are being asked new questions – and many of
them are not easy to answer based on given knowledge and expertise alone.

1. Organization development must offer a compelling vision for the organization of the
future.
With a renewed debate on what ideal organizations should look like, OD must
first offer its stakeholders a compelling vision of the organization’s future.

There are many new models and exciting organization design experiments
available, and they’re hard to ignore. I’ve seen several cases where the initiative for
trying radically new things came from business teams and their managers, sometimes
even catching OD off balance.

Therefore, OD should not only be up-to-date with new models, but should also
have a strategic view of what those models imply for a particular context. Not every
industry and value creation model will fit or will be ready to experiment with a self-
management model, for example. To that end, OD must engage senior leaders at eye
level and be prepared and capable of infusing the OD agenda and insights into the
organization’s strategic discussion. Or to put it more bluntly: OD must talk business, and
simultaneously have a clear business case for its own activities.

A good example is a leading global pharmaceutical company that I supported as

a consultant during their strategic transformation. Long-term success in this business
results in large part from running long-term development and commercialization
programs that involve many stakeholders from different, highly specialized scientific and
business disciplines and functions. Senior management rightly believed that there was
no alternative to being top-of-class in terms of organizational and leadership
capabilities. Today the company is at the forefront of OD, developing new leadership
models with regard to hierarchy and expectations for manager roles, and is
implementing these models globally.

Within that overall organizational vision, OD will have to formulate how it

balances a shared model with the requirements in particular functional, geographic, or
other contexts.Last but not least, we suspect that such a vision for the future
organization cannot ignore the many trends discussed under the labels of future of work
and employee experience.

2. Organization development must evolve its toolkit to design and develop organizations for
new forms of hierarchy, leadership, and decision-making.
With new forms of organizing and models based on decentralization of authority
advancing, OD leaders must reassess their toolboxes. Will the theories, frameworks,
interventions, and workshop formats of the past have the same relevance? What
aspects of them must be further developed?

While these new models mitigate some classic issues that have given rise to
what might be called “OD 1.0” and its value proposition, they have also prompted new
questions. One example: how do we define and develop leadership when there is no
(single) boss and no fixed allocation of authority over a team’s activities? This is not to
say that all of OD’s know-how is obsolete – far from it! But most OD teams will have to
put in the effort to be on top of a whole new range of issues.

3. Organization development teams have to rethink the way they deliver their services.
Working in the context of organizations transforming in a fundamental way, OD
will have to re-assess their delivery models.
 It will no longer be enough to cascade an OD strategy signed off by senior
management along the chain of command, or to use dedicated interventions and
trainings alone.

The future of OD will require working in a much more integrated fashion, often
alongside business functions. Instead of trainings in which the OD agenda can be
promoted in a protected space, OD will have to find ways to integrate their value
delivery into the business agenda, working with leaders and teams as part of the action.

Relating content will increasingly have to happen through blended formats,

leveraging both technology and a direct involvement with the teams being supported.

And OD will have a new role, empowering and enabling business and functional
leaders across the organization to make contributions to the organization’s
development. As such, OD will have to command “meta tools” that allow it to enable
others.

4. Organization development must define its strategy interfacing with leadership

development, learning and development, and talent management functions.
OD will have to work with neighboring functions, including leadership
development, talent management, and learning and development. Sometimes the
functional structure makes alignment more likely (e.g. with all those functions sitting
under the joint leadership of HR), but even then, a coordinated approach is far from
guaranteed. Regardless of the structural set-up, those functions will be crucial to buy
into the organizational vision mentioned above.

For example, the organizational vision discussed above must be a key context
factor for any leadership development effort. The delivery model of OD interventions
should be integrated with the overall learning and development strategy of an
organization. And “organizational intelligence”, meaning the capabilities and practices of
leading and collaborating that keep organizations effective, should be considered in a
company’s talent management approach.
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